# William Perry Pendley **William Perry Pendley** is the lawyer who carried the [[Sagebrush Rebellion]] from western county courthouses into the machinery of the federal government — twice. A self-described sagebrush rebel, he served as president of [[Mountain States Legal Foundation]], ran the [[Bureau of Land Management]] as unconfirmed acting director from 2019 to 2021, and wrote the Interior chapter of [[Project 2025]] that became the operating manual for the second Trump administration's public-lands policy. ## Career Born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1945, a former Marine Corps captain with a University of Wyoming law degree, Pendley was deputy assistant secretary for energy and minerals at Interior under [[James Watt]] from 1981 to 1984. It was the first time the Sagebrush Rebellion captured the agency it was fighting. He was reassigned in 1984 after a federal commission faulted his role in underpriced Powder River Basin coal leases. He led Mountain States Legal Foundation from 1989 to 2019, the Denver litigation shop founded in 1977 to bring property-rights and takings cases against federal land management, where his published positions included the view that the federal government should sell off the public lands and that the [[Bureau of Land Management]]'s retention mandate was illegitimate. In July 2019 he was installed to exercise the authority of BLM director without Senate confirmation, through a chain of temporary delegations. Trump nominated him formally in June 2020 and withdrew the nomination in August. On **September 25, 2020**, Judge Brian Morris (D. Mont.), in a suit brought by Montana Governor Steve Bullock, ruled that Pendley had served unlawfully for 424 days under the [[Federal Vacancies Reform Act]]. Morris later voided resource management plans issued under his authority, including one that opened some 650,000 acres to drilling. Pendley's response was "I have not been ousted," and he stayed on as deputy director until January 2021. He also ran the relocation of BLM headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado. Of the 328 Washington positions moved west, only 41 employees relocated and 287 left the bureau. That gutted the senior career staff, and critics argued the gutting was the point. ## Project 2025 Pendley authored the Department of the Interior chapter of *Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise*. Its public-lands program is the direct textual bridge between the movement's decades-old demands and 2025–2026 policy: - **Vacate [[Executive Order 14008]]** and strip from resource management plans any decision that "advance[s] the 30x30 agenda" — see [[30x30 Conservation Initiative]] - **Review and downsize national monument proclamations**, and curtail the [[Antiquities Act]] itself - Reopen public lands and offshore waters to energy and mineral development - Relocate BLM headquarters west again Most of that list was executed in the first eighteen months of the second Trump administration. That included the [[Public Lands Rule]] rescission of May 2026 (see [[Federal Land Policy and Management Act]]). A second headquarters move has been debated since 2025, but this page could not confirm that it happened. ## KB significance Pendley is the clearest single illustration of the pattern this KB tracks in public-lands politics: the movement's decisive victories are not won in referendums or lawsuits but through **personnel and drafting**. Watt in 1981 and Pendley in 2019 and 2025 are the same mechanism, and the 2025 [[Office of Legal Counsel]] opinion reversing eighty-seven years of settled monument doctrine is what it produces when it works. ---